The above video from the movie Talladega Nights is a comic look at how we make Jesus into our own image. While it is comic in this video, if we are honest with ourselves, each and everyone of us, in some way, seeks to make Jesus into our own image, instead of seeking to be made into the image and likeness of Jesus. Even just this week a writer put this out on Twitter.
In the book “Not My Jesus” the author Bob Fabey seeks to get behind this concept of why we seek to make Jesus into our own image, instead of the other way around. He peels back the layers of the white, American, consumeristic, Jesus by taking us to the Scriptures to show us what Jesus was truly like. Which allows us to answer the question that Jesus is asking, “Who do you say that I am?” Farley, then says that once we truly understand who Jesus was and is, then we can begin to live a life, through the power of the Holy Spirit, that reflects this Jesus, and not the Jesus of our own making.
Probably the most poignant part of the book, for me, and super relevant for our time, is the chapter dealing with the importance of loving people, and not making them out as the “other”. When we make someone or a group of people, the “other” we can scapegoat them for all the world’s ills (then Nazi Germany and the Jews, and many modern day parallels), and once we have made them the “other” we can treat them in any way we want, and justly it in our minds. Farley puts it like this, “When people are The Other, they are less than.” But the Jesus of the Scriptures, the Word of God made flesh, has become “the other” for us and for all, so that we could be full of love, grace, compassion and mercy for all who are made in the image of God.
I would encourage you to read “Not My Jesus” so that it can help us confront how we have all made Jesus into our own image, and seek, through the power of the Holy Sprit, to flip it around so that we could be made more and more into his image and likeness.
(I was provided this book by the Speakeasy Book program free of charge for an honest review.)